Beneath the royal sceptre, the peoples live in the greatest freedom compatible with their obedience to God and their respect for the common good. They therefore concern themselves with thinking, willing and acting in accordance with their aspirations, and for this reason they never cease creating mutual aid societies and organising themselves into communities that are extremely numerous and diversified. It is right and necessary that the nation should thus exhibit itself in its organisations and hierarchies, that it should be mindful of its sacred obligations, and that it should provide itself with opportunities for protected public debates and dialogue with the royal power.
1. The Chamber of Orders will be the place where the nation’s great Orders meet for consultation and debate in the persons of their most eminent members or their elected representatives. The king will refer to it in all matters involving the nation’s spiritual and moral patrimony as well as the grave necessities of the nation's common good. The Chamber itself will regulate the institution and organisation of the Orders it represents; it will establish their rank, their honour and their dignity. It will express its wishes for the attention of the royal power; it will issue rulings in the domain proper to it – public morality and health, and defence of the nation’s culture and patrimony – but the king will have the overall right of veto and decision.
2. The Chamber of States will be the representative assembly of France’s corporations and regions, both at home and overseas. It will be the product of the country’s provincial assemblies, corporate chambers and great institutions. It will be referred to by its own commissions on questions relating to the organisation of regions and professions, as well as on all particular conflicts of interest. It will deliberate on the rights of corporations, examine the repercussions of royal ordinances on the social and economic life of the country, vote on the budget, and organise the collection and allocation of taxes.
Over all decisions the king will have the right of veto. He himself will appear before the Chamber of States to explain and sometimes impose his will, if he judges it necessary for the higher common good, even though this may involve grave consequences for the interests of the provinces and of the corporations and therefore arouse legitimate opposition from the Chamber.
3. The Council of the Kingdom, whose members are appointed for life by the king and who are chosen from among the most glorious, the most honourable and the wisest of his subjects, will judge the compatibility of the royal power’s laws, ordinances, decrees and regulations with the nation’s faith and traditions. It will have the right of remonstrating with the king to the extent of asking him to abdicate, but its only arms will be the passive ones of boycott or resignation, individual or collective, as a mark of protest against dereliction of duty.
The nation, a work of faith, authority and civilisation, is eminently formed and maintained by its great traditional aristocracies, aristocracies of either birth or service, independent of the State and anterior to its administration, but bound to the king by a fundamental allegiance. The people have nothing to fear from these aristocracies. On the contrary, these aristocracies preserve and deliver the people from those soulless and unscrupulous oligarchies who lord it over them in a democracy for their own class interests, reducing everything to the slavery of money.
1. The first of the nation’s orders is the Catholic clergy in their legitimate hierarchy, the episcopal body. The Church, a sovereign and perfect society, fully recognised by the royal power to the exclusion of all others, administers herself sovereignly in communion with Rome according to canon law. She regulates the functions of Catholic worship, teaching, charity and the apostolate. She is also free to manage her own property. Far from restricting the Church’s activity, the royal power aids and privileges the clergy, so that their religious and human goals may be perfectly realised. The royal power will also prevent anyone from attacking the Church’s honour, her ministers or her property.
2. The king, the enemy of all gallicanism whether clerical or intellectual, will maintain close diplomatic relationships with the Holy See and a direct personal relationship of submission and filial obedience to the Roman Pontiff. But the royal State will discuss the kingdom’s ecclesiastical affairs with the bishops of France, themselves in union with Rome.
3. As a matter of principle and justice, the clergy owe the king a public and personal loyalty, and a loyal submission to the Constitution and laws of the kingdom. If necessary – though it is to be hoped that it is not necessary – a concordat will establish the statutory elements of this entente and the norms for solving possible conflicts, so that the most perfect harmony between Church and State may be maintained.
4. The Catholic religion is the religion of the king of France. Only this religion will constitute an established body within the nation, with its own representatives in the Chamber of Orders wherein it enjoys the pre-eminence of honour. Other religions are tolerated and their public manifestations authorised by royal indult, which can always be revoked, but the indult has the force of law and is therefore recognised and respected by every citizen under the State’s control and protection.
But no supposed revelation or religion can be allowed to injure the glory of God, the honour of the Catholic Church, submission to the king, Christian morality and the laws of the kingdom.
The time has gone, never to return, when the courts of justice, the parliaments, attributed to themselves an exorbitant right of control over the acts of the royal government and over the registration of pontifical acts in the kingdom. This claim, which was always seditious, was responsible for undermining religion in France, eroding the monarchy, and for originating their downfall. By a just reversal of fortune, the parliaments were swept away in the ruin they provoked. Since then the magistrature has always been discredited and subjected to the power of the government, to the great misfortune of the nation.
1. Under the restored monarchy, the magistrates will render justice with respect for the divine majesty and in the name of the king, sovereign judge in his kingdom. Confining itself to this great and noble function, the magistrature will be invested with all the authority and honour necessary to its role, as was never the case in its republican past. It will constitute the second order of the nation.
Justice cannot be secular or atheist. Where God is lacking, justice is lacking and iniquity reigns. Delegated by the king to judge in accordance with the laws and in all conscience, the magistrates will preside beneath the Crucifix, before which they will have taken the oaths required for the functioning and execution of justice.
2. In full possession of their honour and their responsibilities, the magistrates will no longer be shamefully subjected to the party men who succeed one another in government and in the chancellery. Factions will exert no further pressure on them, purging them, sacking them, bullying them, discrediting them, and influencing them by their various threats of invoking the justice of the people and making political appeals, or by the internal organisation of revolutionary unions. To guarantee their personal freedom, the magistrates of the bench and the prosecution will no longer be subject to a statute which, for all its pompous and idle guarantees, effectively turns them into civil servants, albeit of an independent Order. By the king’s authority they will decide, under the presidency of the Keeper of the Seals, himself always a magistrate, all questions concerning their recruitment, their remuneration, their appointment and promotion, their internal discipline and public morality. They will have full possession of their title and, except for dishonesty and dereliction of duty, they will always be in the service of the king, whose arm of justice they are, immovable and immune in their office.
3. The judiciary organisation will be profoundly remodelled in order to correspond to the traditional, decentralised and self-directing national order. At the summit of the jurisdictional edifice there will be the magistrature of honour, formed by the counsellors of the kingdom appointed by the king to guard the constitution of the kingdom, its fundamental laws and unwritten traditions. The magistrature of office will comprise all the common law magistrates of the royal courts and tribunals, a new legal nobility, the guardian of the traditions of honour and service through which justice and civil peace will re-blossom in the kingdom of lilies. These magistrates will render justice in conformity with the general laws of the kingdom in all civil and penal matters. Furthermore, as members of an independent order, they will take an active part in the Chamber of Orders in elaborating laws, particularly penal laws. Finally the magistrature of States will incorporate all local and specialist courts – to be restored, cleansed or strengthened in their indispensable role – all urban and rural courts, all corporative, commercial and conciliation courts, which will be made up of specialised magistrates, whether they be professionals or elected from among their respective communities and corporations.
4. Exceptional jurisdictions, in the political sense of the term – almost the ordinary rule in the Republic, for it knows how to defend itself in contempt of the citizens’ rights – will be proscribed, especially courts of justice made up of sworn partisans or agents of government revenge. The king needs no more than his ordinary justice and his ordinary magistrates to pursue crimes of whatever kind. And in cases of urgency and necessity, there will be the military tribunals, which will of course be restored for their indispensable and ordinary function within the army, but also for the extraordinary situations of war or revolution that involve the application of martial law.
But the so-called people’s justice, which is always partisan, will be banished. Justice is too high, too sovereign a function, to lend itself to the people’s sport and passion. Better the justice of the king than the justice of the people which covers all manner of crime. And, for this reason, it will doubtless be fitting to suppress the institution of the jury, criticised a thousand times, and rightly so, by the professional magistrates.
The time has gone, never to return, when the Sorbonne and the "intellectuals", philosophers and writers of every kind, took it upon themselves to pass sovereign judgement on the ecclesiastical and royal powers in the name of their own lights, in a fanatical inquisition that was seditious and disastrous for the country. It was they and the parliaments, both opinion-forming powers, that caused the downfall of the monarchy. But they paid heavily for their error by falling into discredit and becoming the slaves of the democratic powers, or rather of the financial powers. Having been freed from such inordinate ambition and dishonourable servitude, intelligence will rediscover the nobility of its civilising function.
1. In the restored monarchy, colleges, schools, institutes and universities will regain total independence with regard to the political powers. There will be no Minister of National Education, nor will teachers be salaried civil servants. Establishments of teaching, education, scientific research and culture will have their own professional statutes and their own independent revenues. They will be able to hold property in mortmain, receive legacies, donations and endowments, and these will rapidly guarantee the financing of their free and prosperous institutions. The Order of Masters will unite all the members of the teaching body; it will have its own examinations and diplomas, its own varying degrees of aptitude from primary level to higher level.
The authorities, religious or secular, regional and communal, corporative and professional, will establish, at the king’s instigation if necessary, universities, faculties, schools, colleges, professional and agricultural institutes, parochial and local schools, out of their own resources and on their own responsibility. The teaching staff will be recruited according to the norms and with the agreement of the Order of Masters, and for the Church from her teaching congregations.
2. The existence of a traditional and powerful independent university body, in conformity with the customs of our old civilised countries, will safeguard the schools and universities from the constricting and exclusive hold of the business world over teaching.
On the other hand, the intervention of the nation’s living organs at every level, both provincial and local, but also corporations and liberal institutes, will revitalise the academic world and allow its teaching to be better adapted to the real needs of the nation.
Similarly, the control exercised by the Church, mistress of truth, by the Chamber of Orders, guardian of public morality and of the national patrimony, and ultimately by the king himself, the father of his people who takes a keen interest in and watches over their education and instruction, will maintain a high standard in teaching and preserve the great traditional disciplines of French and Catholic inspiration, whilst avoiding the muddy waters of a subversive, immoral and anti-patriotic culture, which most of the teaching establishments under the Republic had fallen into.
3. All of the so-called liberal professions – doctors, chemists, architects, lawyers, solicitors, notaries, etc. – will also, like the masters, be regrouped in orders, as the New State of Marshal Pétain had wished. As all these professions have a great influence on the nation, its physical and moral health, its spirit and formation, its traditional values and works, their orders will become the guardians of such qualities. They will faithfully maintain their honour and fix their regulations and their conditions of practice. For this purpose, they will possess authority, organisation and resources, but always under the necessary control and arbitration of the royal power and the Chamber of Orders.
It is a known fact that it has always been the subversives and the corrupt who have wished to destroy these protective orders. And the latter themselves have too often given way, both morally and statutorily, under the constraints of democracy.
Researchers and scholars, accredited by various diplomas, functions and merits, will be welcomed and honoured in these orders, and also in the institutes and colleges that the corporations or the royal family will create, as they did in the past to stimulate and promote French science and intelligence.
4. Public and private academies, both national and local, and literary, scientific and artistic societies, will prosper whilst jealously guarding their independence and their organs of representation, management and defence. For even in this sphere it is necessary to protect and to promote talent and honesty, contrary to the morals of a certain world of arts and letters that has fallen under the control of money or the socialist State.
Here again, the king of France and the natural aristocracies, both new and old, will rediscover their prestigious role as patrons, which made France the "mother of the arts", of taste and of elegance.
Finally, journalism itself will not escape this need to be constituted in an order, an order that will give it a moral code and high standards, and which will protect it from the influence of money, government powers, pressure groups or foreign interference. Instead of the regime of the freedom of the press, which in fact is servility and depravity, the Chamber of Orders will pass a ruling on the provision of information, which will define in a rigorous but liberating statute the duties and rights of the press.
Such will be the full character of this varied and powerful world of science, letters, teaching, professions and liberal arts. Under the king, it will spread its life and its strength. It will make all its groups and institutes become a general third order in the nation.
The requirements of social charity – formerly assured by the Church, then relegated harshly to the confines of society by the rising bourgeoisie, and finally collectivised by the republican state – have fallen into discredit and scandalous impotence throughout the world. It is through religion and the example of the royal family that true charity towards the very poor will have to be restored, regenerated and reintegrated into the life and sensibilities of the national community.
1. Under the restored monarchy, the order of social charity will have to be created from scratch under the sign of the dedication and generosity of its members. It will recognise, integrate and organise all those charitable associations and institutions devoted to relieving the misfortune, wretchedness and infirmity of the nation's and empire's "rejects". Its elites will thereby be ennobled and they will watch over the financial honesty, functioning and prosperity of so many diverse organisations.
At the same time, any new association or nascent congregation will be granted the fullest liberty to devote itself to any particular charitable service, so that no initiative aimed at relieving moral and physical human misery be rejected, due regard of course being paid to public order, the ordinary rules of honesty and good morals, and the principles of natural common sense and supernatural Christian sense. Hence the control of a general Order is considered necessary, and indeed capable, along with the Church, to judge the character of such a work.
2. This Order will be distinct from every other association or mutual benefit society. It will be distinct from professional therapy services, insurance companies, and organisations administering pension or corporation funds. This independence will allow it to focus constantly on its essential aim: the free provision of aid to those who are really poor, those who lack ability, possessions and merit.
3. The king in person, the queen, the princes and princesses, will be the leading members and directors of this noble body. Its action will be characterised by the freedom of its donations and the generosity of its members, by its Christian spirit of service and kindness towards those in distress, and by its wisdom and prudence in directing common charity.
This Order will act in close relationship with the Church. It will possess its own organisation and patrimony. It will be renewed by means of co-optation based on the credentials and guarantees of honour. The monarchy, its head, will watch over it and foster its spirit of Christian and French dedication.
The phalangist, through prayer and spiritual conversion, has come to "think clearly and walk uprightly", every aberration having been corrected and every passion set aside. The political problem thus appears to him to be of a limpid simplicity. It is clear that politics is a grand and divine affair through which Providence intends to govern nations and to allow them to share in the truth, grace and beauty of the reign of Jesus Christ. If on the other hand men should revolt and their politics should ignore God, their political system then becomes a powerful instrument for their unhappiness and for their eternal ruin.
But politics is nonetheless an accessible human science, a practicable art, a function in society, a work to be done well and a task to be performed correctly by those who are designated and formed for this purpose, those who are blessed by God, accepted by the people, and personally content with such a role. It comes under the organisational empiricism of Maurras, whose golden rule was to know political good and evil by analysing the present in the light of the past, to foresee where one is going, in order to provide for the best solutions (A. Comte). Using this method, there may be deduced a political wisdom that is deeply rooted in the nation’s history, free from all ideological passion as well as from all democratic passion – an empiricism – and yet capable of making clear choices and of justifying them – an organisational empiricism.
Divine politics and human politics ratify the same historical judgements.
1. In France, privileged by God and a model for other nations, there exists a founding and protective oligarchy: the episcopal and monastic Church. And there also exists a sovereign family, the Capetian dynasty, "the forty kings who during a thousand years created France". The Church comes first, for it is she who anointed the kings and upheld their power, regulating and controlling them in accordance with the divine law. The Dynasty comes immediately after in the order of urgency for the public well-being, for it assumes its task, from father to son, with a sovereign authority, in a profound communion of sentiment and destiny with its peoples.
2. There are no better solutions, nor is there anything more reasonable or more practical for the problem of political government. Every other solution yields to democratic contamination and consequently to the totalitarian temptation. A constitutional monarchy, parliamentary and liberal, a plebiscitary empire, a presidential or democratic republic, all prove to be less Christian, less wise and less stable than the monarchy. Only one form of political constitution approaches it: that of a public security dictatorship. This is an extraordinary monarchy, of transitory value, threatened by the twin dangers of anarchy and despotism, if it is not fully and decidedly open to the complete restoration of the Christian monarchy.
3. The phalangist’s choice is made. He is a monarchist of the extreme right. And in this frame of mind he knows that beyond the intrigues and propaganda of the republican "legal country", he is in profound harmony with the "real country", the heritage of his ancestors, the expectation of the newly born, and the nation’s immense need for security, concord and peace.